Notes on teaching blends and digraphs

Occasionally we've found we just want to focus on a particular blend/digraph rather than work comprehensively through a range of word sorts. This page is for collecting links to resources useful for particular blends and digraphs.

Blends and digraphs links
These sites contain information about multiple digraphs

• http://www.firstschoolyears.com/literacy/word/phonics/digraphs/digraphs.htm
  
  
• Starfall's Learn to Read page has lots of great games and sections on various digraphs

Teaching the 'wh' digraph

Background Information

Want to know way too much about the difference between 'w' and 'wh'? Read some articles like:

• Wikipedia's "phonological history of 'wh'"
• Something less technical - a discussion of whether 'wh' sounds different to 'w'
• Something funny - the 'Wil Wheaton' snippet from Family Guy and the 'Cool Whip' snippet (note - link starts clip at 52 sec to concentrate on the whip bit)

Teaching links

• Animated sequence from starfall giving examples of 'wh' words
• A whole set of simple activity worksheets on 'wh' at littlebooklane.com. This includes an A4 poster with lots of 'wh' words
• Some people have pinned lots of digraph activities (warning - many of these are links to teacherspayteachers):
  • Teaching - digraphs by smidgie421
• List of 'wh' words from firstschoolyears.com
• Three useful ideas for teaching digraphs and links to TpT resources
• Sparklebox has a whole 'wh' category with posters and a bingo game
• A consonant digraph garden - what a great idea, and could be adapted into a picture created in a spelling book, or a whole classroom resource...

Still to come - more blends and digraphs...for instance the digraph song

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